


A Posterity in the Earth

by pendrecarc



Category: The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Egregious misuse of the King James Version, First Time, Future Fic, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 09:59:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14850641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: "...and Joseph's brethren came, and bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth."There is a sign outside the trading post, and the name written on it is Eli Sisters.





	A Posterity in the Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starlatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlatine/gifts).



I was in the back room, which I had in a high-sounding way begun to call my office by virtue of the table and chair and the cabinets where I kept the accounts, when I heard the bell ring over the shop door and began to listen carefully to what transpired in the front. By then I had two employees, one a young man who made up for his lack of brains and ambition with a pair of strong arms and a friendly way with the customers, the other a girl whose cleverness had impressed me when I explained our stocking and book-keeping procedures but who was as yet untried in the matter of salesmanship. She was in the front that afternoon and I wanted to hear how she managed.

“Good afternoon, sir,” came her cheerful voice at once. “How can we help you? Are you in need of dry goods today, or of equipment?”

“Of clothes,” said the customer. “I have been some time on the road and have nothing fine to wear. What do you have that’s suitable for a wedding?”

“Your own, sir?”

“Certainly not, but I wish to look respectable. And if it’s suitable for a funeral, too, all the better—I will get far more use out of it if so, and may even wear it to my own.”

The girl was not overly concerned with the morbidity of this statement, or else she was too professional to show it. I marked this point down in her favor. She began to talk to the customer about shirts, expounding on the everyday usefulness of white cotton and contrasting it with the very fine linen we had if he wished to cut a more distinguished figure at whatever occasion he was attending. I had by that time risen from my chair and opened the door to the front. They did not see me watching but continued to discuss the merits of a pleated front, with the result that I was able to look the customer over from head to toe without his observing me. It was an opportunity I was glad of, for he was none other than my brother Charlie, whom I had not seen for several years.

He was very disreputable-looking. I would not have admitted him to any wedding I had ever attended, dressed like that. He wore a jacket I recognized, though when he had last ridden away from Mother’s it was washed and mended. Now it was worn through and stained past repair, though the right cuff was pinned up very neatly. His hat was a disgrace. The bag he carried over his good arm was tattered and looked one thread short of shedding its contents over the floor. His face was thick with stubble but very thin of flesh, which spoke of the privations of the road and concerned me more than the rest. The clothes at least could be fixed immediately.

“You will need shoes as well,” I said. I watched his back grow stiff at the sound of my voice and wondered if he had not after all known he would find me here. I had written to him more than once detailing the change in my professional situation, and I knew Mother had written as well, but the occasional letters we had received in reply had given us little more information than his location at the time of posting. “I wouldn’t let a dog chew the boots you’re wearing. Anyway, you missed Mother’s wedding.”

“Did I?” He turned toward me and I saw that the skin under his left eye was the purplish green of an old bruise.

“You know very well that you did. It happened two months ago.”

“Two months ago I was in California, and I had more urgent matters on my mind than a wedding.”

“And two months before that, when I wrote you to say she was going to be married and wanted you home?”

“You wrote and said she wanted me home,” he replied, “but she didn’t say so. It’s the sort of lie you would tell. My brother Eli has a soft heart,” he added to the girl, who had occupied herself with the arrangement of several garments Charlie might possibly want, but at the other end of the room. She glanced up when he spoke to her and smiled. It was a brief sort of smile that did not encourage further communication of a personal nature, which I thought very appropriate under the circumstances, but which my brother chose not to respect. “I suppose you’ve figured that out, if you’re working for him.”

“Mr. Sisters is a generous employer,” she said. “I’m glad of my position. Is it brown pants you’ll be wanting, sir, or black?”

“A soft heart,” he continued, “and a soft head. I once knew him to pay a woman five dollars for nothing but a smile, when I had services rendered for free.”

I began to be angry, then, and told the girl to go back to the office, where I wanted her to copy out the next month’s order of dry goods in her neat hand. She went without a glance back at either of us. “You have no business saying those things to my employee.”

He laughed. “Doesn’t she know your reputation, brother?”

“She’s a good deal cleverer than you and doesn’t need your opinion to have one of her own. And besides that,” I said, “the incident you’re referring to took place years ago and is not worth bringing up. It was unkind of you to remember it.”

“That’s the nature of family,” said my brother. “I will take black pants and a cotton shirt, and a vest as well.”

I made him take an undershirt and socks along with the rest of it, as I had no doubt the ones he wore were fit for nothing but the rag pile, and sent him into the room where we kept the rakes and hoes and other light equipment in case the girl came back out while his pants were around his ankles. She did not, and I suspected her of having found something else to keep her busy rather than be subjected to a family argument. When he came out again I saw I had mistaken his size. I thought at first I had forgotten it, which would not have been surprising as we had not been living out of one another’s pockets for some time, but then I looked at the belt he was wearing and saw he had punched two uneven holes through the leather to tighten it further. I found him a new belt as well and pants that would fit, and then I told him the price.

“I’m not paying you that,” he said, and then when I told him the price I’d named did not include the shoes, he cursed me and said what he thought of a man who would cheat his own family.

“I’m not telling you the price so you can pay me,” I said. “I’m telling you so you know the value of your clothes and are reminded that this is a business. You can repay me by leaving the girl alone and shaving your face before we go to Mother’s.”

“I’ll add the price you’re not charging me to the five dollars you paid for nothing, the hundred dollars in gold dust you threw away once, and every other bit of misplaced generosity through the years. The sum total of your foolishness.”

“There is a pump out back and some soap,” I said. “You can wash there and then shave upstairs where I have a mirror. Then we’ll go to Mother’s.”

He went out back, and I called for the girl and told her she could go home as I was locking up early that day. She did not question this, but I have rarely known anyone to question several hours of unexpected leisure, and between my brother’s foul temper and his unkempt appearance I am sure she did not want to remain there while he was present. This seemed funny to me, as not so long before there had been many women who would have chosen his company over mine on such short acquaintance. Now he had come down in the world, and while I cut no finer a figure than I ever had I was at least respectable and therefore to be preferred.

My brother came back inside, dripping wet but much cleaner. “Where is the mirror?”

“Upstairs,” I said, and I took him there. He looked at the narrow, carpeted staircase and the vine-covered wallpaper in the hall above and shook his head, and when we passed the bedroom door on the right and the bedroom door on the left he laughed aloud.

“You live here?”

“It’s sufficient,” I said, stung by his tone. I had not expected Charlie to be impressed with my accomplishments since our parting, as I knew him far too well for that, but they were indeed accomplishments and they were my own, and I did not like to hear them denigrated. “I made up the old room at Mother’s and stayed there for a while, but I didn’t want to stay once she was married.”

“No,” said Charlie. “I can see that. Is it true that he’s a preacher?”

“It’s true.”

“It’s a ridiculous thing, to think of our mother married to a man of the cloth.”

“Well, she is. He belongs to one of the newer sects. He has a congregation in town and I believe they like him very well.”

Charlie was uninterested in our stepfather’s congregation but very interested in a shave. I brought him water and a light and he stood in the little washroom at the corner of the building, where the window opened onto a grassy yard and then rows of tall spruce trees. He unpacked his razor and toothbrush from the bag he carried with him and asked for the use of my shaving cream and tooth powder, which I was happy to provide so as to be less offended by his continued proximity. Then he asked me why I was standing in the doorway and watching him shave, so I went back downstairs to lock up.

The trading post I now owned had been established when I was young, though along more modest lines than I ran it now. I remembered coming inside with Charlie for a bottle of sarsaparilla and thinking as I did that it was a large and impressive place, with a greater variety of goods than I had ever seen together. It was associated in my mind with the smell of spruce wood and wool, and with the rasp of canvas bags stuffed full with flour and sugar and dried beans against the smooth skin of my boyish hand. Now it was mine. I had put my name on the sign out front, and after I had locked up the office where I kept the money I wiped down the counter and went outside, the better to read that name for myself in the fading light. Charlie came down and found me there, and he stepped back to get a good view for himself.

“The name is placed poorly,” he said.

“What?”

“On the sign. There’s too much space beside your name. It’s lopsided. Was the man drunk who painted it?”

So much for worldly ambitions. I locked the door, and we left.

“Does Mother know to expect us for supper?” I asked. “I don’t suppose you sent a note to say you’d arrived.” I could not believe he had gone there before coming to me, not looking as he had on his arrival. The shave had helped considerably, as had the slicking back of his wet hair under the new hat I had given him, but there was still a half-starved look about him I did not like. The removal of his beard made the blackened eye look worse, not better.

“We aren’t going to Mother’s for supper.”

“Of course we are.”

He shook his head and set a course down the main street, looking like a man who knew his destination. “I’ll tell her tomorrow that I’m here. I don’t want to surprise her.”

“Unlike the last time you arrived,” I said, “half dead on the back of Morris’ horse and out of your wits on morphine. I don’t think this is the same sort of surprise.”

“Tomorrow,” he said again, and then he frowned. We had been passing people in the street, which was not a very busy one and I knew them all, so I had been touching my hat as we went and receiving the usual sort of friendly greeting in return. “You know these people.”

“You do as well. We grew up here.”

“I don’t know all of them. Him, for example.” He indicated the man who had just passed us on horseback. “Who is he?”

“August Wiles. He moved here two years before we returned and established a physician’s practice. He has his degree from a university in Chicago but wished to live in a part of the country with more trees than houses and not to be woken by the blast of steamhorns in the middle of the night. Mother sees him for her headaches.”

“When did Mother develop headaches?”

“She has had them for years.”

“And that woman who smiled at you, in the blue dress. Who is she?”

“Frances Sutton, who was Frances Allen when we were young. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

“I remember Frances Allen,” he said, turning to stare after her, so that I had to grasp him by the elbow and redirect him along our way before we could be overtaken by the foot traffic or be accused of harassing a respectable matron. “That’s Frances Allen?”

“That was Frances Allen. It’s Sutton now, as I told you. Where are we going?”

“To have a drink and a bite to eat, where else?” This much at least he seemed to remember without trouble, and led me straight to the saloon at the back of the old hotel, where he said he had stabled his horse. I did not like to eat there, as the food was heavy without being flavorful and the drink had no appeal unless you truly wished to become drunk. That was a habit I had come to avoid in recent years, as it had bad associations for me and as I now had to be up early every morning to open the shop. Nevertheless I allowed Charlie to lead me there, because he was clearly in need of a meal no matter where it came from. I got us a table and ordered a meal while he disappeared out back, but by the time the food had arrived he had still not returned, and I started to grow impatient.

I began to eat the roast, sopping up the grease and gravy with the bread that accompanied it and wishing for a pat of good, creamy butter to help it down. Instead there was brandy, of which I drank more than I intended. I had not visited that place in long enough that my appearance caused some surprise, and several men stopped by the table to speak to me, but it was my brother I wished to speak to and I was less patient with them than would otherwise have been my inclination. At last he came back inside when I was done with my own meal, and he sat down.

“Your roast is cold,” I told him, “and the gravy is congealed.” It had not had a very pleasant texture to begin with, and the sight of it now where it sat in fatty pools on his plate was far from easy on my stomach, so that I was uncertain whether to be glad I had already finished eating.

“I don’t care,” he said, and set about eating it with a rapidity that I found disconcerting to watch. I hoped at least it would put some weight back on his frame.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“In the stables, selling the horse that brought me here.”

I heard this announcement with a great deal of surprise and not a little hope. “Do you mean you have no further need of a horse?”

“I mean I have need of money. When I want a horse again, I’ll arrange for one.”

“And when do you think that will be?”

“When I choose to leave. Be quiet for a bit while I eat.” He paced his drinking to match, and I watched him with uneasiness. He finished the first plate and called for a second.

“You look as though it’s been some time since your last good meal,” I said.

“I have been traveling in a hurry.”

“Trying to be here in time for the wedding.”

He gave me a deep, forbidding frown over his now refilled plate. “You’re very concerned about this wedding that I missed.”

“Our Mother’s wedding.”

“I didn’t attend her first one, either.” He grinned at me. The gravy and brandy had undone all the good that had come from the tooth powder, and I considered telling him so but decided better of it. “Why’d she up and get married again, anyway? It’s not as though the first time brought her much joy.”

“Our stepfather is a decent man,” I said. “Or at least he’s decent to her, which is all I am in a position to ask for. I haven’t asked if he brings her joy, but she seems content, which is all most of us are in a position to hope for.” I had thought on contentment a great deal since my change of profession and had concluded it was a superior goal to happiness, as it was both far more likely to be attained and far less likely to bring me to grief in the attempting of it.

“He’s moved into her house, has he?”

“He has. You’re going to say he married her for her property, but there are richer widows here with better property.”

“She’s made great improvements to that house.”

“She has,” I agreed, “and I’ve assisted with them since you left. I was happy to do so. Maybe if you’d stayed to contribute anything useful you’d have something to contribute to the question of her property now, but since you didn’t, I suggest we find another topic of conversation.”

“Very well,” said my brother, looking more amused than angry, no doubt because the food and the alcohol had begun to put him in a better frame of mind. “I’ll have another drink. Will you?”

“No.”

“Why not? I’m paying for dinner.”

This uncharacteristic spate of generosity surprised me, and I told him he couldn’t expect to buy another horse worth having if he spent all the proceeds from the last one on brandy. “Unless you’ve found some very lucrative work recently,” I said, which it was obvious he had not. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

He shrugged. My scolding had evidently soured his mood.

“Where did you get that black eye?”

Charlie laughed. “I tripped in a busy street.”

“After too much drink?”

“After being tripped by a man who wanted to pick a fight. I gave it to him. You may wonder about the sort of man who would start a fistfight with a cripple; I ask you instead to wonder about the sort of man who would start that fight and lose.”

“Was it a professional disagreement?”

“What profession would that be?”

It was not as though the people sitting around us didn’t know exactly how my brother and I had spent our years of travel, but I did not like to call attention to my past in any explicit sort of way, which Charlie must have known even if he was already much the worse for drink. “Mother would want me to ask if you’ve fallen back into old habits.”

“I am no longer capable of falling back into old habits,” he said with a deep bitterness. “I’m not offered the sort of jobs I used to be. There are other men in the profession who still have their shooting hands, and who aren’t so easily recognizable by the sleeve hanging loose at their sides. I can’t shoot from horseback.”

I was beginning to regret raising the subject, as we were receiving sidelong looks from the saloon’s other patrons. “So you have found another way of making a living.”

“Is it another way, if it’s all the same, but at a much smaller and more miserable scale?”

“You could have left it,” I said, which I knew already that I should not have done.

He slammed his glass down onto the table, where it rattled the plate and left a ring of condensation on the wood. “I could have bought up a trading post like you, and fixed Mother’s house just the way she wanted it so a preacher could come and live in it, and hired a shrew-faced girl to handle the customers so I could hide in the back myself.”

“You could have if you’d wanted,” I said. “Instead you chose not to, and you had to come back here without a wearable set of clothes on your back or a decent meal in your stomach to show me how much you despise me. Well, that’s fine if so. I won’t tell you what to do. But I won’t sit here and be told, either.” I got up and left without another word, as he had after all promised to pay for the dinner, and I was not in a charitable enough mood to ensure our bill was handled as it ought to be.

I walked alone back to the shop and went upstairs. The lack of light under the door opposite mine suggested that the boy had not yet come home; it had been his day off, and he had spent it pursuing a young woman who worked at the telegraph office. As far as I had been able to tell, he was not making much headway, but neither was she opposed to the idea. I wished them both well of the affair and hoped his luck had been in that evening. I remembered being so young and wondered what would have become of my life if I had chosen to stay where I was and pursue a mutual interest with one of the young women here—with Frances Allen, perhaps, who might now be neither Frances Allen or Frances Sutton but Frances Sisters. I wondered what would have become of Charlie if I had done that instead.

I walked along the hall to the washroom and found I was drunker than I had realized on leaving the saloon and also had not bothered to bring a light. As a result, I stumbled over my brother’s tattered bag, which I saw that he had left along with his razor and toothbrush. I knew he would be back in the morning to ask for them, with no apologies for the inconvenience he had put me to in the process. I washed myself and went to lie down in the high brass bed, but sleep did not come easily. I lay wide awake under the covers and at length reached down my hand in the hope that the old soothing method, which helped so well when I had reached a high pitch of fury, would serve for restlessness as well. To my disappointment it did not serve. The truth was that there was nothing to be served, as the combination of overindulgence in drink to which I had become unaccustomed and a mood which could better be described as dispirited than angry left me unable to achieve the required physical state.

It was shortly after I had reached this unhappy conclusion that there came a loud pounding downstairs and the sound of my brother calling my name, which I could hear very clearly as the temperature was mild and after so many nights sleeping outside I still liked the feel of fresh air in my room, and so slept with the window wide open. I lay a moment longer, at first with no intention of going down to him, and then thinking I ought to go down before he woke the neighbors. Finally I rose out of the conviction that if I did not go down and quiet him, I would certainly not sleep at all.

How he had found my store again I had no idea, because he could barely stand upright and grasped my arm tightly to keep from falling over. “I thought you’d be staying at the hotel,” I said, when what I should have said was that I didn’t care if he spent the night in a hotel bed or in the alley behind the saloon.

“I left my bag.”

“You forgot your bag.”

“Never forget my bag.” He pitched forward, and rather than stand there in the doorway for the rest of the night I pulled him inside and guided him up the stairs. He stumbled the whole way, but at the moment I had very little compassion for anyone’s situation but my own, and I spared no effort to keep him from banging into the walls.

When we were up in the hall, he wove from side to side in confusion and said, “Which one is yours?”

He was referring to the door, I realized, and I said, “This one,” indicating the room on the left. He took a deliberate step to the right. “Where are you going?”

He blinked at me, as though I might be the one drunk enough to forget the location of my own bedroom. “Other room.”

“That’s not mine,” I said. “That’s where the boy stays.”

“The what?”

“The boy,” I repeated, “who I’ve hired along with the girl you harassed earlier today to see to my customers, since as you’ve pointed out I’m not capable of it myself. You can’t sleep there. He may be back soon.” I moved him with some difficulty into my own room—he had always been a thinner man than me and now was considerably more so, but the loss of weight made him no less difficult to maneuver. I removed his pistol first and put it on the small table just inside the door. Then I got him into my bed and removed his shoes, which seemed more consideration than he was really entitled, but I did not want to be woken every half hour by being kicked with hard rubber soles. I loosened his belt as well, which I suppose I cannot put down to an interest in anyone’s comfort but Charlie’s. He turned his face into my only pillow and began to snore. I put my back to him so I faced the window and could see the faint glow of moonlight through the trees. And, contrary to my expectations, I fell at once to sleep.

He woke very early, as sometimes happens after having a great deal to drink, and woke me as well with his stumbling and cursing as he got out of bed, evidently still far from sober. I wondered what he thought he was about but wished to go back to sleep if I could, so I did not ask him, and only followed the sound of his footsteps as they retreated down the hall toward the washroom. Then I heard him relieving himself. This accomplished he stayed where he was, to what end I could not at first imagine, until I made out the soft, distinctive noises made by a toothbrush vigorously applied. The ridiculousness of this struck me as I lay there and I laughed, loudly enough that he must have heard, because the brushing stopped for a moment. Then it resumed again, and I heard the tapping of the brush against the basin. He came slowly back to the room. It was not quite dawn.

“Did that improve matters?” I asked.

“It usually does. Move over.” I had nowhere to move, but he did not wait for me to point this out, only laid himself down beside me with a groan. I thought he was on his way back to sleep, but after a moment he said, “This is Mother’s bed.”

“Her new husband bought them a new one. It’s larger.” I’d carried it up to her room in pieces and assembled it myself, a much more onerous task than I had expected. When their new mattress arrived on the train the following week I had needed the boy to help me bring that up the stairs of Mother’s house and put it on the bed. Love was a weighty thing.

“It couldn’t possibly be smaller,” Charlie said, which all things considered I thought was astounding ingratitude, and I told him so.

I also rolled onto my back, which took up more space than before and made him complain, but I ignored this and stared up at the darkened ceiling. My brain felt soft and oddly full inside my skull, but comfortably so, in the way the mind goes fuzzy and blank in the small hours of the morning or in that strange state between drunkenness and sobriety.

“We were born in this bed,” I said. The thought was strangely restful to me.

Charlie began to laugh. It was his old laugh, a harsh and mocking one, and often I had found it cruel, but for whatever reason just then I did not. “We were _got_ in this bed,” he said. “How’s that for a bedtime story? And then they laid Father out in it.”

I turned on my side again, this time facing him, and frowned, though of course he couldn’t see it in the dark. “I am speaking of life,” I said, with what dignity I could manage. In retrospect I do not imagine it was a great deal. “Of—of comforting things that make me glad to think of them. And you—”

“I like comfort as much as the next man.”

“Then let me have mine, Charlie.”

He laughed again and began to say something else, but I reached up and put my hand over the lower part of his face. It did not quite catch his mouth as I had intended, but it did quiet him. I dropped my voice. “Did you hear that?”

Drunk as he still was and out of old habits as we had fallen, the particular note of warning in my voice was enough to make him still beneath my palm. I took my hand back slowly. “What is it?” he asked.

“Downstairs, at the front of the store,” I said. “The sound of glass breaking. Be quiet.”

He was, and we both listened but heard nothing besides the sound of our own breathing. I shifted slightly where I lay and froze at once at the creak of the bed beneath me. I thought of the boy, wondering if perhaps he had lost his key and come back very late and drunk, but that was not like him, and even if so I thought I would have heard him at the side door, not the front. Then there was more breaking glass, and we both heard the groan of floorboards, very faint.

“I didn’t tell you why I left California and came here,” Charlie said. I could smell the mint on his breath and the brandy beneath it. “It wasn’t for Mother’s wedding.”

“I know that.”

“Where is my gun?”

“Haven’t you drunk too much to shoot?”

“I lost my shooting hand, not my tolerance,” he said. I did not argue with this but retrieved his gun from the tabletop, as well as the two I kept myself in the drawer underneath. Anyone downstairs would have been able to hear me moving around the room, but I did not care because I had decided two things: that I was not going to be shot to death above my place of business after I had made of my life something with which I was satisfied, and that anyone who thought otherwise deserved to be shown the error of his ways.

Charlie had sat up. I could see the whites of his eyes in the moonlight. They were looking at the pistols I was holding, one in each hand. “Just like old times,” he said.

“Not especially,” I said. I went out into the hall.

The men downstairs—there were two of them, as I could hear because they were no lighter on their feet than I was—had brought a lantern with them. I could see the glow of it as I approached the head of the stair. “Who’s there?” I called in the interest of giving them the opportunity to reconsider, and also in case I was wrong after all and it was the boy come in late with a friend to help him find his way.

They did not reply at first. Charlie came out to join me. I put a hand up to keep him back from the stair.

“We’re here for Charlie Sisters,” said a voice from below.

“Yes,” I said, “but that is not what I asked you.”

“Ask him who we are.”

“You are men of no account and less understanding,” called my brother, “and if you’ve followed me here from Sacramento it was on a fool’s errand.”

“We’ve found you, though,” said the other man downstairs. “We were told at the saloon that you had been in with your brother and left, and we had only to walk half a mile in the direction they gave us before we saw a sign with the name ‘Eli Sisters’ above the front door.”

“You ought to have come a few hours before, and you would have found him staggering drunk and alone in the street,” I said. “As it is, you had better leave and forget you were ever here.”

“I don’t think we’re going to do that,” said the first man. He would have continued speaking but I stepped forward to the head of the stair, turned so I could see past the landing, and shot twice, once at the pale face turned up toward me with its mouth gaping open and again at the chest against which the lantern was framed. The bodies fell and then a second later the lantern did too, and I leapt quickly down the stairs to beat out the flame before the rug could catch fire.

As I did this Charlie came down as well. He had an awkward time of it, as he had not done up the belt I had unbuckled for him and his pants had fallen down past his waist, and he could not easily pull them back up and hold his pistol. He bent over the man who had been holding the lantern, whom I had shot in the chest rather than the head and who as a result was not quite dead. “I told you,” he said, “it was a fool’s errand.”

“If they had come a few hours before, as I said, it might not have been,” I said. “Is one of these the man who blackened your eye?”

The man on the floor let out a wheezing breath. Charlie ignored me. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“ _You_ should not have come,” I said, “if you knew these men were coming after you. What if they had gone to Mother’s instead?” Charlie had nothing to say to that. There was a ringing in my ears that was very familiar to me, and my breath had started to come shallow. I went into my office where I kept a lamp and lit it, and by the time I came back out the second man had also died, and the blood was spreading out over the rug.

Charlie looked at me. “What should we do with them?”

“Nothing tonight,” I said. “In the morning I will go to the sheriff and report that my store has been broken into and that I have as a result killed two men.”

He straightened slowly, his hand clutching both his pistol and the waist of his pants to keep them from sliding down again. “That is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said to me, Eli.”

“If you would prefer to drag them out back and burn them, as we have done before, you are welcome to do it,” I said. “And then to explain it to the sheriff and my neighbors yourself.” I tried to steady my breathing and looked down at the bodies on the floor. Now that I had a lamp, I could see that they were both in late middle age and were unremarkable aside from their disreputable appearance. I wondered if I would have looked much like them in a few years, if I had not chosen to give up their sort of life. I thought that Charlie might, still, come to look very much like them. “We should move them away from the stairs,” I said. “And wrap them in the rug, in case the boy comes home tonight after all.”

Charlie was not very much help with this, though I had not expected him to be. The exertion brought heat to my face and made my breath turn from light pants to deeper gasps. When I straightened at last I could hardly see despite the lamp. I could feel my hands, however, and knew there was blood smeared across both palms and up my right wrist. I did not need to see him to know Charlie was watching me.

“Excuse me,” I said, setting the lamp down on the floor, and I felt my way up the stairs with one hand on the wall and walked the length of the hall to the washroom, where I began to scrub at the blood.

“Eli,” said my brother from the doorway.

I didn’t look at him. I had been trying not to think of him at all. A trembling had begun to overtake my limbs, of a kind and to an extent I had not felt in years. I heard him come into the room and then I felt the weight of his body lean into mine. His face pressed against my neck and he mouthed at my skin, very hot and wet. The stubble on his chin rasped against my throat, and his nose nudged at the base of my ear. He pulled himself away and left a slick patch of saliva where he had been, and he asked, “What comfort are you after now?”

I groaned. It felt like desire and the strange madness that came over me sometimes had reached deep into my stomach and pulled the sound out with them. I turned so our shoulders bumped one another until I was facing him, and I reached up to take him by the base of his skull and press his mouth back against me, encouraging every swipe of tongue and lip until he bit down, not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to hold me to him.

I shuddered and began to pull at his clothes. He had still not buckled his belt, so the white cotton shirt pulled easily from his pants. My fingernails scraped on the skin of his belly and were shocked at the softness of it, and my hands fumbled lower and were likewise shocked at the rigidity of his erection straining toward me. There was a kind of softness to that as well, or perhaps what I mean is that there was indeed a kind of comfort, as we rutted against one another in the dark and narrow washroom and I found my release against his rough and naked thigh.

I regained some control of my mental faculties after I had done this. I will not say I regained my senses, because the next thing I did was to bring him with me down the hall and into my room, where we came together again in that bed of brass and clean cotton and he spent in my hands. When later we fell back to sleep, there was the comfort of his chest against my shoulder and I could feel the beat of his heart against my skin.

I thought on this that morning as I rose, washed, and dressed, and concluded that I felt very well in body despite a very poor dinner and little rest; in mind I was likewise untroubled. I left him still asleep when I went downstairs and past the bodies of the two men under the rug. The boy had not come home in the night, and I was glad to think I might be able to spare him the sight.

The front window was broken, but still I locked the door behind me before I walked to the other side of town where I knew the sheriff lived and interrupted his breakfast. He heard me out with grave professionalism and joined me in walking back to the store, where he made a thorough examination of the broken window, the two men under the rug, and the pistols they had been holding. He also looked at the walls in the stairway. I had smeared blood along the vine-covered paper.

Charlie came downstairs. He had borrowed one of my shirts, which fit him very badly but was at least clean. He had washed himself and looked only a little ill from the brandy the night before. I introduced him to Sheriff Sutton, who hesitated only for a second before extending his left hand rather than his right.

“Mr. Sisters,” said the sheriff. “Your brother has been telling me about these men, and that they followed you north from California. Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain your disagreement with them.”

“It was in the nature of a professional disagreement,” said my brother.

“I would like you to be more specific, Mr. Sisters.”

“I don’t know as I can do that,” Charlie said. “If I did, you might be obliged to take notice of it in ways that would benefit neither of us. I will say that it began as a professional disagreement, escalated due to a physical altercation in a public place that left me with a blackened eye and that larger gentleman with several broken ribs, and has concluded as you see. Did my brother say your name was Sutton?”

“He is married to the woman you knew as Frances Allen,” I said, which left Charlie to consider the strangeness of a world where the sheriff’s wife would smile at me in the street.

“Well,” Sutton said, “leaving aside matters that occurred outside my jurisdiction, this seems like a clear case of self-defense. I will send some men to collect the bodies, and though I will require additional statements of both of you I think that will be an end to the matter. But you understand, Mr. Sisters,” and here he meant Charlie, “that here we are in fact within my jurisdiction, and I hope we will not find ourselves in a professional disagreement.”

“That’s understood,” I said. Neither of them questioned my right to reply on his behalf, which was gratifying to me.

The boy arrived home at this point. He wore an expression that suggested his pursuit of the girl at the telegraph office had seen some satisfactory developments. Out of a sense of fellow-feeling I did not wish to spoil his excellent mood, and before he could see the bodies under the rug I had headed him off and told him he ought to take the day to visit his family, and that he might come back that evening after matters had been dealt with.

He left and the sheriff did as well. “You had better keep that girl from coming in,” said Charlie. “I’m sure she’s never seen so much blood before.”

“Her father is a butcher,” I said, “and she won’t be coming in at all because the store will not open today. It’s Sunday.”

“So it is.”

“I will get you a new shirt,” I said. “And you should shave.”

“Are you taking me to Mother’s?”

“No,” I said. “I’m taking you to church.”

The arguments I presented in favor of this course of action were that he ought to make a good impression on our stepfather; that Mother would be glad to see us there; and that the events of the night before were sure to become public, and it would be as well to be seen about respectable pursuits before that happened. In the end I think he agreed to go with me out of bafflement and not because I had persuaded him, but he did agree to go.

Mother was indeed glad to see us. She showed surprise at Charlie’s presence but hid her shock at his haggard appearance. We sat beside her in the pew and I followed along with the rhythms of the service as I had learned to do in my occasional visits. Charlie did not follow along but also did not disrupt us.

The sermon was on the forty-third chapter of Genesis, in which Joseph upon being reunited with his family in Egypt was so moved that his “bowels did yearn upon his brother”, the son of his mother. When later the preacher enjoined us to ask forgiveness for our sins, I did not, for though I have committed many in my life I did not feel any of them had occurred in the recent past.

We rose for a hymn, which Charlie did not know and which I did not sing. Under the cover of the organ I said to him quietly, “My name is placed poorly because I left additional space beside it.”

“What?”

“On the sign outside the store which you criticized yesterday,” I said. “Where it says ‘Eli Sisters’, there is room for it to say ‘Charlie’ as well.”

“That was a stupid thing of you to have done, and it is a stupider thing to tell me about it now after I have been gone for years.”

“Maybe it is,” I said, “but you’re here now regardless.” The hymn ended before he could reply and we sat down together, Charlie so close beside me that my arm brushed against his, and our mother on my other side smelling of soap and clean cotton.

It did not seem probable to me that my brother’s name would join mine on that sign. Whatever he may say, I am not a stupid man. But I am a hopeful one, and as we sat there I began to reconsider my views on contentment and happiness, and to think that even if I did not have the opportunity to rewrite the sign outside that store, I had once managed to rewrite the life of the man who now lived inside it. I might do so again.


End file.
